AS-Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(4)

To harness the free flow of information is crucial for the success of this symbiotic process. If information needs arise then there is a gap in the state of knowledge. Information seeking and use are inseparable from our human and social activities. Without information, without fresh knowledge and without their derivatives such as creativity and innovation, we cannot become contemporary humans. Being informed is a dynamic, non-linear, disorderly, chaotic, postmodern process. Student’s cognitive needs, affective needs, situational demands should be taken into consideration in the manufacturing process. The student’s surging feelings of confidence and self control add much to the quality of the product.

By processing information, we acquire new knowledge. According to Chun Wei Choo, eight classes of information are used: Enlightenment, problem understanding, instrumental, factual, confirmational, projective, motivational and personal or political. The principal information activities in sense making are scanning, noticing, and interpreting, Chun Wei Choo adds. The main medium of sense making is face-to-face conversation between different sets of people who engage in human activities such as talking, thinking, and seeing. This can remind us of Levinas’ face-to-face encounter with the other for the sake of peace making by the ‘sameness’ process which installs a responsibility for the other in the Self. By Choo’s understanding of face-to-face feature of the process, the output is a net of shared meanings which assigns significance to ambiguous cues. Information can be meaning oriented allowing dissimilar interpretations to coexist. Mobilized internal knowledge helps to promote the sharing of information. By the symbiosis of knowledge and information, the market and information technology rejuvenate in this Symbiotic Era.

We murdered the real, if we comment on Baudrillard’s Murder of the Real in the Vital Illusion. “The perfect crime no longer involves God (of Nietzsche), but Reality, and it is not a symbolic murder but an extermination” writes Baudrillard. Nothing is left of reality, no trace, not even a corpse as ‘extermination’ suggests. Nothing is either true or false, but reality is not dead absolutely as no crime is perfect, jokes Baudrillard.

“...today there is nothing left but a map (the virtual abstraction of the territory), and on this map some fragments of the real are still floating and drifting.” (2000:63)

The hyperrealization of the real is a crime with a total mystery. There is no suspect. There is no weapon. All traditional functions, the critical, the political, the sexual, the social survive only in simulation.

“We seem to be driven by a huge and irresistible compulsion that acts on us through the very progress of technologies ( expanding for example in what we call ‘information highways’ and could as well call ‘disinformation highways, a compulsion to draw ever closer to the unconditional realization of the real.” (Baudrillard 2000:65)

Because there is too much of the Real, it is disappearing, Baudrillard acknowledges, just as the excess of information puts an end to information, or the excess of communication puts an end to communication and too much creativity puts an end to innovation.

Until now in this paper we advocated the idea of symbiosis between Information and Knowledge, between Creativity and Innovation. But now we should add that we would better not exaggerate this notion as well, taking the French philosopher’s warning into consideration against excess. Just like Plato, we would better champion his well known phrase ‘moderation in everything’. In the cases of too much reality, too much information, too much innovation we do not know exactly what is taking place. That is true Messieur Baudrillard, it may be that humankind is doomed to disappear in this catastrophic process.

Baudrillard’s solution for this problem of total disappearance is that we must no longer assume any principal of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events. It is not easy, as he says, to renounce truth is the most difficult thing although truth no longer affords a solution. To crown it all, absolute truth is another name for death. We must find better quests than going after the absolutes.

An underlying and unifying truth and certainty that can render the world coherent and meaningful can be split into a multitude of reigning units, can be pluralistic with no horizantal or vertical order by the power of popular culture. Decentered knowledge can produce multiple meanings. The unified subject of modernity can be the fragmented subject of postmodernity. Maybe only a symbiosis can reduce the drawbacks of the fragmented whole to turn into dust and irritate humans by whirlwinds. The expected result is certainly not nihilism.

A symbiotic student should not deny truth altogether, but should be aware of the multiplicity of local contingent truths; should not claim to abolish all norms but should know that they have to be struggled over and should assume a personal responsibility in this struggle. To the Enlightenment ideals of critical reason and humanistic individual freedom, it is only added a rational subject capable of exercising self motivation and self direction. There is still subjectivity but more ambivalent and less fixed in positioning. The symbiotic student’s education is going through profound changes as well. Interdisciplinary and experiental approaches in teaching and learning can help to realize the promising symbiosis: To create and produce the symbiotic student educated both by modern and postmodern practices. In Postmodernism and Education Robin Usher and Richard Edwards warn us against ‘emancipatory intentions’ which can turn out to be the means of a new oppression.

“Self-referentiality is perhaps one of the key aspects of a postmodern perspective. Its particular significance lies in providing a constant reminder that all discourses can have power effects. It is, for example, attractive to replace notions of individualistic humanism with those of social empowerment but care is needed to ensure that this does not result in the substitution of one oppressive discourse for another. As Foucault reminds us, discourses of emancipation despite their emancipatory intent, are still bound up with the ‘will to power’. Educators find it hard to accept that their emancipatory intentions, their desire to enlighten may be implicated with the ‘will to power’ and may, therefore, have oppressive consequences. A postmodernist perspective reminds us that historically this has been the case and that we as educators, therefore, need always to question any discursive practice, no matter how benevolent, for the configurations of emancipation/oppression within it.”(Usher-Edwards 1994:27)

Ayten Suvak

(To be continued)

Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(3)

This transformation occurs in teacher-student dichotomy as well. For Paulo Freire, the Brasilian educational theorist, there is a teacher-student in the classroom, a teacher who learns and a student-teacher, a learner who teaches. That way teacher-student dichotomy could be completely abolished. Freire’s ‘banking concept of education’ takes the student as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Locke’s ‘tabula rasa’ becomes the ‘banking concept’ and both of them handle the student’s mind as an emptiness to be filled, a ‘fill-in-the-blank’ test. Hopefully with the symbiosis of teacher and student this void is reciprocal. The movement towards symbiosis in every dimension has begun as Kurokawa believes:

“The symbiosis of humankind and nature, the symbiosis of intellect and emotion, the symbiosis of science and technology and art, the symbiosis of commerce and culture, the symbiosis of public and private...the symbiosis of different cultures, the symbiosis of work and play...” (Kurokawa:45)

We can playfully add to this list, the symbiosis of knowledge and information, the symbiosis of creativity and innovation. When knowledge is decentered, the outcome is information, and when creativity is applied it is called innovation. Modernist certainty undermined, the consequent uncertainty pervaids knowledge which is constantly changing. Knowledge without having fixed references is open to multiple interpretations. Information can be called hyperknowledge, borrowing Jean Baudrillard’s term ‘hyperreality’.

Hyperreality is the product of Information Age where something becomes information when it is assigned a Saussurrean significance through the processes of signifier and signified. Their blend, signification, namely information, finds its way in the mind of the receiver by some cognitive agent. Philosophers who prefer to think about knowledge with different sets of analytical tools, may dismiss the scientist’s computer programs, feedbacks, flowcharts loaded with information. If knowledge is for the elite, information is for the common. Information need not have any meaning in order to be communicated. Information yields knowledge, knowledge requires truth, information may require it as well. This fact reconciles knowledge with information, the elite with the common, modernity with postmodernity, the whole with the fragment. The symbiosis of knowledge and information is possible since both depend on truth altough “information is after all a valuable commodity” in Fred I. Dretske’s opinion. Who cares if information may not provide us with any meaning at all? We can tell what a computer is, without telling what it means.

“Information is a commodity that, given the right recipient is capable of yielding knowledge”. (Dretske 1999:47)

While student’s mind is a ‘bank account’ to be filled by education, it is also a commodity. Information loaded student mind is twice commodity, given the right recipient, it is capable of yielding creative and innovative knowledge. Our thesis statement to make a symbiosis of information and knowledge, creativity and innovation turn out to be valid in line of this logic. As Dretske observes:

“What we learn, in terms of both content and amount, is limited by the information available. It is moreover a commodity, that can be transmitted, received, exchanged, stored, lost, recovered, bought and sold. In terms of what it can do and what can be done to it, this is the sort of thing we are referring to when we talk about information.”. 

A traditional answer to the question of knowledge is that, it is a form of justified true belief. What if beliefs can be false and the truth may not be believed any more? Then in an easy way we can support the idea that knowledge is information produced belief since education as an organization sets its agenda for learning and knowledge building. Quoting from the Knowing Organization ( How organizations use information to construct meaning, create knowledge and make decisions):

“The result is fresh knowledge that leads to innovation in the form of new products and new competences. When it is time to decide a strategy or a course of action, decision makers need to know which elements are most important to the organization, what options and capabilities are available and how to disentangle a complex web of factors and contingencies to make an acceptable choice.” (Choo Chun Wei 1998: 25)

‘The knowledge creation process’ can be utilized in manufacturing creative and innovative students capable of a symbiosis which uses the right amount of information and knowledge as ingredients. One way to extend communication and information services is to allow markets to work. Information service should be available to the entire population. New technologies and new business models must be revised for narrowing gaps in educational institutions since “ access to and use of communication and information services present major inequalities among and within countries” as The World Bank acknowledges (2006:41)

Ayten Suvak

(To be Continued)

Innovation and Creativity in Educational Enterprise(2)

Starting to the enterprise aspect of our topic, we can say that a large industry of educational materials is invading the world markets today using individuals as their brainstorming agents. Teachers, students, families are all being treated as commodities. Every year all sorts of techniques appear in the educational market. Teachers are postmodern pilgrims of our age, working as disseminators of learning techniques, of knowledge, of information. All are devised to motivate and control the on going educational industry.

The process of building an enthusiasm for learning in this hectic age of ours is really a very challenging job. We can imagine it as a battlefield where individual wants and needs of the learner, the goals of the parents, the widespread goals of educational institutions, private educational centers of Turkey and the goals of society in broad sense of the word, are engaged in constant row.

As inventors of technology, the ‘developed’ counties are in master positions against ‘under-developed’ ones. Users or appliers of technology may be considered as slaves. Turkey is an open market for all kinds of technologies but we may be called masters of imported goods if we do not like the term ‘slave’.

Turkish high school students are stuffed with an excess of educational material unable to know how to apply their skills outside of school. But thanks to quiz shows of TV which make millionaires out of tenacious memories, we can have a chance to be ‘somebody’. Maybe teachers should be oriented to endow students with that kind of commercialized knowledge.

Education and being educated take their toll on students and families in Turkey. A large percent of Turkish population is under an enormous constraint on account of anxieties caused by the educational system. Since spiritual richness is devalued by economic exigencies, nearly every one of us is after quick gains leaving morals and ethics amiss. 

There are no traditional role models any more. No examplary heroes from family circles. Heroes arise among celebrities who also serve as role-models. Media members who introduce these new heroes to the public should be educated properly first, as long as they are new age teachers for the masses. This may count as a kind of open education. Since knowledge is considered as a human construct, the most suitable construction for our survival should be created by mass-media.

To educate students for the business world, for the great enterprises, we need great visions for educating teachers subordinated to this entrepreneurial system of education. Both students and teachers have fallen prey to education in the 21st century. The world is relentlessly commanded by financial kingdoms. Who cares whether peoples of the world are properly educated or not! We all are produced according to harsh, competitive capitalistic expectations.

Excessive work and hardship in teacher training in USA, as shown in the seminar titled ‘Becoming a Teacher’-August 2009 at Bogazici University in Istanbul, are seemingly for the benefit of the people in general but looking from the illeteracy perspective in the States, good teaching is not enough for learning. Can we say that is because people have generally lost trust in institutions which cannot prevent the world from being torn down to a chaotic hell: Famine, redundancy, inequality, incessant wars, massacres everywhere. We as humans have no time for self-discovery in this mind-blowing world.

We would better focus on character development, ‘sensitivity training’ based on innate benevolence, if one may trace an inkling of it in us, human beings. A life lived closer to nature could be better than nurture. It will not be surprising if we all become cyborgs, half human, half automats in the nearest future. We must be reminded of our old moral values by the God in ourselves if it is not dead already in this Age of Digital Slavery where new ethical problems arise together with technology, new life styles and destructive social changes.

With the aid of creativity and innovation , can we imagine of a future education that will be a symbiosis of knowledge and information to meet the new life demands?

We are widely informed in this Digital Age of ours. We know a bit of everything, one can say we are erudite readers as long as we can spend long hours in front of the monitor without any complaints. Innumerable sites offer us a rich variety of information and knowledge on all fields of research. Do you wish to be informed about life and deeds of Oscar Wilde? Just put down his first and last names in the google. You will be informed until you will not feel your buttocks under your stylish velvet pants on the chair. Your neck will get stiff as if you swallowed a walking stick. Your watering starry eyes will reflect the impression of a mourning widow.

Every one of us as postmodern individuals is doomed to be overeducated by information technologies, by postindustrial society’s highly competitive expectations on creativity and innovation and by postpsychoanalysis’ chaotic debates on whether to choose between the whole and the fragmented selves for case studies.

The educational problems arise while molding students for modern centers of production or for postindustrial social formations such as centers of consumption, shopping malls, financial services or entertainment centers. Since attaining knowledge is a deep down, tiresome and long process compared to the informative one, in the general sense, we have to welcome shortcuts in education in order to keep pace with the ‘speedy Gonzales’ walks of posteducation.

Our aim in this paper is to draw a creative and innovative poststudent picture through a philosophical symbiosis of knowledge and information: A student who smartly adapts the Platonic phrase ‘Know Thyself’ into its popular variety ‘Inform Yourself’ by your creative and innovative skills.

Just as there is a continuity between modernity and post modernity, between creativity and innovation, it is expected to exist one such continuity between knowledge and information. Knowledge carries modernity’s faith in rationality and science as it uncovers the natural order of things. Its main task is human betterment, nevertheless it is questioned either epistemologically and metaphysically. By the continuation of disease, famine, want and destruction, that ‘noble’ task is rendered somehow incredible. The progressive and humanizing missions of universal and transcendental foundations of knowledge proved themselves to be false by inhuman practices of power, examples of which exist everywhere. Yes, knowledge is power, but informative technologies are more powerful in making the posthumans reject universal claims and more successful in making them accept the partial, the local and the specific.

In education as well there is no authorising position of the former mass-student production. As Kisho Kurokawa states in the Philosophy of Symbiosis: “The transformation from the age of the machine to the age of life is a simultaneous transformation from industrial society to information society.” (Kurokawa 1994:43)

Ayten Suvak

(To be continued) 

AS-Innovation And Creativity In Educational Enterprise

We start our paper with an examplary paragraph on creativity paged from an internet site with the title:

“A new idea for a few minutes of your time- Saturday, June 06, 2009

Through a colleague, I found a very interesting and creative businessmodel. Christine Santora and Justin Gignac are a couple from New York City who started with quite a special project: they have defined some wants for example - an Iphone, chicken wings, some sleep, ... and they create a painting about that need (so they paint an IPhone or some chicken wings). The price for the painting is exactly the price for the item that they want. So if you buy 'a slice of peperoni', then you have to pay 3 dollars and they buy it and enjoy it.” (www.creax.net)

Where creativity is defined as a derivative of freedom, playing with ideas, refraining from the judgement of people in a climate of challenge and high goals, innovation is definded as applied creativity. If we can give our age the name of the above internet site ‘Creatopia’ which suggests a kind of utopia, similarly we can call our innovative aspirations as ‘innovatopia’. Utopia in the latest sense points at an age of hope. Creatopia supports the idea of optimism through its logo ‘No time to be a pessimist. It is experience time. It is time to trade ideas for money. A workshop’s topic being ‘The art of doing nothing and everything’ values the abilities of an innovative and creative brain.

“...In a lot of cases, when you do nothing, you are probably doing a lot somewhere else. So the topic is still going on and we didn't come to one conclusion and I guess that's very good. Leave the open space so nothing can happen ;-)”. (www.creax.net)

Creativity and innovation may be regarded as two siblings who play in the school yard together. They do homework sometimes together, sometimes apart. They exercise practical jokes on each other, sometimes quarrelling sometimes in peace. They acquire skills for an ever expanding globalized market place. They learn that to be successful means to be creative and innovative in order to allure diverse customers to the market. An increasing competition among students is inevitable. New and clever strategies are needed to win the battle or at least to end the match without a tie-breaker. If a granny has difficulty in comprehending such a bitter use of brains as weapons, an unnamed author may remind him or her ‘the law of years’:

“Youth does not want to be understood, it wants to be let alone. The grown up who would approach it too importunately is as ridiculous in its eyes as if he had put on children’s clothes. We may feel with youth, but youth does not feel with us.” (Author unknown)

Taking down barriers to inquisitiveness, creating unrestricted atmospheres for children and youth to pose questions in whatever subject imaginable are today’s globalized education’s main aim. To let young people’s curiosity know no boundaries can open the way to raise new generations both with ‘personal and social capitals’, if I may borrow the term from Henry Etzkowitz. (http://create2009.europa.eu/press/news_archive/news_singleview)

Project based, student centered education’s emphasis on collaboration and communication of brains are expected to create active minded co-creators of the new culture. Interdisciplinary studies on group projects are highly recommended. Time is a crucial factor for obtaining creative output. ‘Ten-year-rule’ works in that creation process. In order to be creative, ‘in-depth domain’ expertise is proven to be highly important according to the psychological research done by Dean Keith Sminton. Knowledge, creative thinking, and motivation are said to be three components of creativity. “Team work of people with different knowledge degrees improves the breadth of knowledge”, writes Karlyn Adams in her websited article in 2006. (www.skillscommision.org/pdf/commissioned_¬papers/Sourcesof Innovation). Feeling free to disagree with others, combining knowledge of the past with that of the present and ‘incubate’ or sleep over knowledge for a later remembrance with a relaxed mind-set just as English poet Wordsworth did before he put down his poetic verses are higly recommended for the creation of a creative mind.

Basic techniques used in modeling creativity are questioning assumptions; defining and redefining problems; encouraging idea generation; cross-fertilizing ideas by allowing time for creative thinking; instructing and assessing creativity and rewarding creative ideas and products which are said to be the best predictors of future creative products. Because creative work takes much time and energy, students with creative minds may be discouraged by either teachers or peers but some little games with the letter P may help to relax the tension:

Portfolios of work
Patterns of creativity
Pondering time
Pastimes spent on innovation
Pedagogic knowledge of creativity
Pathways to creativity and innovation
Public and peer estimation

For (P)erfect creativity, test scores are found to be better predictors of creative life achievements than IQs or school grades. As an unnamed author suggests “it is essential that the student be led to do what is to be learned. A student does not learn what is in a lecture or a book. He learns only what the lecture or book caused him to do.”(Teaching in Further Education-2004)

This paper’s topic being on mainly creation and innovation, we attempted to use the popular technique of brainstorming to clarify those two phenomenon in an informal way. As the Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein nicely said:”Whatever can be said at all can be said clearly, and whatever cannot be said clearly should not be said at all (1922)”.

Brainstorming is a process that works best with a group of people when followed the following four rules, as it is made clear in CREAX-Creative Workforce Innovation:

“Have a well-defined and clearly stated problem 
Have someone assigned to write down all the ideas as they occur 
Have the right number of people in the group 
Have someone in charge to help enforce the following guidelines: 
Suspend judgment 
Every idea is accepted and recorded 
Encourage people to build on the ideas of others 
Encourage way-out and odd ideas”.

(To be continued)

Ayten Suvak

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Education for All...